Defensive teams will run offensive AI agents to train defense systems
Kevin Mandia · America’s $700 Billion Defense Tech Rebuild · Jul 24, 2026 · at 32:50
Kevin Mandia, founder of Mandiant, outlines how AI will transform cybersecurity training and critical infrastructure protection.
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“There is no question that In the future, you'll have AI agents on offense run by the good guys to train the AI on defense run by the good guys.”
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“We want to build the whole hyper attack platform. Everything a nation state would build on offense. We want to build.”
AI-native developers are over 100x more productive than traditional engineers
“It's not 10 X. It's more than a hundred X productivity with an AI native developer working on software. We've had over a hundred commits in a day building our software. We have a different demo every two to three days. I never had that before.”
Mandia: AI-native software developers are over 100 times more productive.
“It's not 10 X. It's more than a hundred X productivity with an AI native developer working on software.”
Mandia: Nation-states will always beat private companies in cyberattacks
“When a nation state targets a company, guess who wins? The nation does, not the company... You cannot expect great blue chip companies that constantly every day pitch a perfect game on defense against nations that are targeting them. It's just an unfair fight.”
Mandia: Fully autonomous cyber defense systems will emerge within three years.
“Fast forward two or three years, Joe, you're going to see an autonomous defense crafted, trained by the world's best cyber offense, you know, the hyper attack platform.”
Mandia: AI attackers will eliminate the 10-minute human incident-response window.
“The day where a human would break in, and if you were 10 minutes behind the human on defense, you could stop the impact of a breach, is going to end. There's going to be an agent that breaks in, then another agent uploaded because it had remote code access, Re…”